He was the God of prophecy, medicine, music, art, law, beauty and wisdom.

Later he became the God of sun and light. 

He is my namesake. If only I posessed more of his traits. 

My name is Polina. I am twenty-three and a foreigner to all things my name truly means. 

______

I have lived here all my life. I have gone to sleep in my bed and awoke as I am. Constant. All my life. The seasons changed, but even that was set. Four seasons, twelve months, and back again. The paint may have begun to chip and the colour to fade, my body and face may have aged. I now have breasts where before there were none, the shape of a woman replacing the lines of a girl. But still it is all the same. These changesunnoticed, undocumented, unimportant, because my mind was fixed. My perception set. The world felt ordered in its chaos. My home, though there was danger there always, everywhere, merely different types, they were detached. My solitude intentional based on the dream of all that age and time promised. I merely had to wait. 

Then today came. 

 I realized that Polina must now change because all of the perameters of my life that I had taken for grantited, all absolutes that I had believed- I realized as I those darkhaired boys barely eighteen marched down my street, that those, as in all aspects of what I had been were someone else's dreams, ideals, convictions. Mine, my own, were yet to be seen. 

It was those other people that had brought these boys. These boys who worked hard to set their jawlines and march straight ignoring the murmers and stares that permeated the backs of their heads and heated their necks radiating from every porch and window they passed for the length of the street. 

I could not speak. Only stare and cling to the pillar of wood holding up the porch, forcing it to support me as well. All I could think as I was transfixed by the rhythm of their feet cutting the dusk light was that all had changed. Where had those promises of life and age and time gone? This, an occupation, is not what is supposed to be. 

I am twenty-three. Now is that time. It is the time to live fantasies while my body and beauty will allow for such things. It is such things that will allow my mind to open and inform all that I choose my life to be. 

As I watched my world march by from the porch steps, trampling out what it had been, I made a decision. I would be any woman that I longed to be in any given moment. I will explore social condition, restraint and abandoment, to misbehave and treat it as no such thing. I will draw own lines, those drawn for me be damned! Leave them to someone else to shade the contours.

And you with your rough politics and marching destroyed al that had been. So to fuck with you. I will be more than anything you could have expected and I will experience everything that sacres you. This is my life. My world. My dreams. And I will be Polina.

Well-behaved women seldom make history. This is not an exploration of love and romance, though it I do not tread carefully it may end that way, but rather of sex, intellect and body, infatuation and taboo.